Twentieth Century British Art Publications

Fifty Works by Fifty British Women Artists 1900 - 1950Edited by Sacha Llewellyn

Published: November 2018200 pagesISBN: 978-0-9930884-8

Ever since Linda Nochlin asked in 1971, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, art history has been probing the female gaze. Through scholarship and exhibitions, readings have been put in place to counter prevailing assumptions that artistic creativity is primarily a masculine affair. 50/50 functions as a corrective to the exclusion of women from the ‘master’ narratives of art. It introduces fifty artworks by known and lesser-known women – outstanding works that speak out.

Fifty commentaries by fifty different writers bring out each artwork’s unique story – sometimes from an objective art historical perspective and sometimes from an entirely personal point of view – thereby creating a rich and colourful diorama. This exhibition does not, however, attempt to present a survey or to address all the arguments around the history of women and art. Anthologies are of necessity incomplete, and many remarkable imaginations are not here represented.

Women artists have been set apart from male artists not only to their own disadvantage but also to the detriment of British art. While there were some improvements for women to access an artistic career in the twentieth century in terms of patronage, economics and critical attention – all the things that confer professional status – women had the least of everything. By showcasing just a few of the remarkable works produced, this exhibition draws attention to the fact that a vision of British twentieth century art closer to a 50/50 balance would not only provide a truer account, but also a more vivid and meaningful narrative.

In many ways Hagedorn’s career both reflects and is part of wider tendencies in art, for example, in his retreat from radical modernism in the years following the First World War, which reflects the wider ‘Return to Order’ manifested in the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain and Gino Severini on the continent, and artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Edward Wadsworth in Britain. His watercolours of the 1920s encapsulate the search for solace in the landscape that appears in the work of so many others of his generation. These works have a distinctive clarity and call to mind Paul Nash’s question of whether it was possible to ‘Go Modern and Be British’. As an outsider, Hagedorn was not weighed down by such a sense of tradition. In the same period he was also designing eye-catching posters that patriotically called on their viewers to ‘Buy British’ (CAT. 41) applying the lessons of European modernism to commercial advertising for the Empire Marketing Board.

Evans’ strikingly large watercolours (they typically measure over one metre in height or breadth), span two decades, (from the late 1960s to the late 1980s). While powerfully evoking the period charm of the glam-rock era, Evans showed a conscious awareness of the shifting political landscape around him. His compositions are characterised by a kaleidoscopic vision of Thatcher’s Britain: an era of urban redevelopment, the Falklands War, industrial unrest, nuclear power, and the Cold War. Transition is everywhere: new roads carve their way through the countryside; fighter jets cast their shadows across the landscape; the scars left by industrial plants, pylons and landfill permeate throughout.

Instantly recognisable with their distinctive colour-coordinated covers, the eight volumes which make up War Pictures by British Artists were published by the Oxford University Press some 75 years ago. Created to achieve wider appreciation of the artworks commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), the eight themed pocket books played an important role in how the war was perceived by those living through it and how it would be remembered by future generations. ‘What did it look like? they will ask in 1981, and no amount of description or documentation will answer them’; so wrote Kenneth Clark in the unsigned text introducing the original series.

This new publication is the third in a series of Liss Llewellyn projects on war art.

This exhibition, which was five years in the making, was the largest commercial show of Brangwyn’s work ever undertaken. Our aim was to represent every aspect of Brangwyn's
remarkable oeuvre in the belief that the range and diversity of his talent has never previously been fully appreciated. For too long he has been known simply as a muralist or a painter or print maker. We want him to be seen in the round: a man whose self-stated raison d’être was ‘a mission to decorate life’ .

Between 1918 and 1970 Charles Cundall (1890-1971) exhibited nearly two hundred and fifty pictures at the Royal Academy and a further one hundred and seventy-five at the New English Art Club. One hundred and forty-nine of his oil paintings – and countless works on paper – found their way into British public collections. Statistics alone do not argue that an artist is important but it is surprising that this is the first publication on Cundall’s life and work…. In two genres Cundall excelled – he was a master of painting crowd scenes – whether at Irish cattle markets or sporting events such as Derby Day. He was also a master of painting industrial scenes, with compositions spanning half a century recording sites in England, Scotland, Wales and Greece.

Included in The Guardian's choice of best books of 2015. Nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.

The rediscovery of this important collection of works by Evelyn Dunbar is a particularly engaging story. When in September 2012 the BBC Antiques Roadshow was held at Cawdor Castle, amongst the dolls, items of furniture and bric-a-brac that were brought by the queues of people waiting in the inevitable rain was a painting by Dunbar. It was the kind of moment that the television producers must cherish. The Neo-Romantic painting entitled “Autumn and the Poet” (1960) had been brought to the roadshow by a relation of the artist and after it was appraised by Rupert Maas before the cameras it was sold and subsequently donated, through the initiative of LISS LLEWELLYN, to Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery. Ordinarily this outcome might have been the happy ending to a story, but in this case it was only the beginning. None of the works in the collection had previously been recorded, and so it is a remarkable discovery underpinning her position as one of the most significant female figurative artists working in Britain during the twentieth century.

Kenneth Rowntree has always been highly regarded by those familiar with his work. The essays in this catalogue, which embrace new research and scholarship, reveal him to be an artist of great scope and variety. His early work reflects the inspiration and creative dialogue that came out of his friendship with Eric Ravilious (1903–1942) on account of whom Rowntree moved to Great Bardfield during the 1940s. During this period he was particularly preoccupied with Kenneth Clark’s Recording Britain project…. At the end of the war he joined the teaching staff at the Royal College of Art. In 1951 he was commissioned to undertake murals for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion for the Festival of Britain. As Professor of Fine Art in Newcastle (1959–1980) he was at the epicentre of an important northern school of modernism that revolved around his friends Victor Pasmore (1908–1988) and Richard Hamilton (1922–2011). Even in retirement, his work, in its return to figuration from abstraction, displays his consistent qualities of humour and inventiveness. Rowntree’s oeuvre is both influenced by and anticipates a wide variety of artistic styles, from Ravilious to David Hockney, from the Euston Road School to the Dadaism of Kurt Schwitters. His work, however, remains unmistakably his own.

This publication – which has been made possible entirely through the generosity of Tigger Hoare – was prompted by the discovery of a complete set of Brangwyn’s Stations of the Cross, painted in oil, which originally hung in St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough. The participation of the Diocese of London has added a dimension which Brangwyn himself would have relished. Although brought up a Catholic, his faith was a strong belief in Christian values rather than an adherence to one particular creed and he told a friend that ‘Life here is nothing without God. The time comes when one has to leave it all, then one says to oneself what can I say I have done to please Him?’ … In his own self-effacing way Brangwyn did much to please Him.

During his lifetime Brangwyn made large donations of his works to museums in the United Kingdom and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the William Morris Gallery, the Albertina in Vienna and the Gruuthuse in Bruges. As a result of this munificence, substantial drawings by Brangwyn, especially his celebrated large sheets in red and black chalk, only rarely appear on the market. … The endless extant sketches that he made on the backs of envelopes, letterheads and scraps of paper are evidence that for Brangwyn drawing was a compulsion. In her forthcoming catalogue raisonné, Dr. Libby Horner has recorded over three thousand drawings by Brangwyn. … The drawings that became Esser’s collection, which have lain hidden for over half a century, were made up of works that Brangwyn, with characteristic modesty, had left in his studio with a written instruction, ‘most of this lot destroy’. Never intended for presentation, they explore and resolve alternative compositions and the relation of figures to each other and to the space they occupy.

Unsung heroes aside, the greatest strength of this catalogue comes from the large number of remarkable works by women artists. This goes some way to redressing an imbalance: the story of 20th century British Art is told almost always through the work of male artists in spite of the fact that more women than men went to art school in the first half of the 20th century. The Liss Fine Art bias towards women is not intentional. Yet in the search for the best of the less familiar of 20th century British art a disproportionate number of works by women artists come to the fore. This catalogue includes outstanding works by Margaret Gere, Clare Leighton, Kathleen Guthrie, Rachel Reckitt, Barbara Jones, Mary Adshead, Evelyn Dunbar, Paule Vezelay, Muriel Pemberton and Dorothy Mahoney.

100% of the purchase price of this catalogue will go to charity, split between The Red Cross & Morley College.Nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.

This catalogue presents a view of the First World War through a multifarious record of two and three dimensional works of art: paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, reliefs, posters, postcards, photographs, silhouettes and ceramics appear in the following pages. The material has been grouped into 14 subsections under the general headings of Combat, The Home Front and The Aftermath. These groupings highlight the themes that inspired both the fine and popular arts, although some are looser in association than others, and none are mutually exclusive. The introduction gives a more general survey of the underlying factors that influenced or determined the visual responses to the First World War. Although outside the remit of this catalogue, the accompanying exhibition includes other wartime objects from the collection of David and Judith Cohen, including trench art, commemorative ware, sweetheart brooches, games, puzzles and miniatures.

This book is illustrated with a series of specially commissioned photographs that record some of the least known but most remarkable mural cycles in Great Britain. In the vast majority of cases these works have previously only been reproduced in black and white if at all. … Today murals are rarely seen as the artist intended. Often they are partially obscured, especially where there has been a change of building use. Frequently works are completely covered up or painted over – examples include murals by Mary Sargent Florence, Mary Adshead, Eric Ravilious, Dora Carrington, William Roberts and Gilbert Spencer. Where murals survive they are more often than not displaced works. Historic photographs showing John Piper’s The Englishman’s Home at The Festival of Britain, in situ on the river side of the Homes and Gardens Pavilion on Belvedere Road, come as a revelation; a digital reconstruction of Frank Brangwyn’s Empire panels for The House of Lords, seen in situ as they were originally intended, gives a dramatically more favourable impression than their final installation in The Brangwyn Hall, Swansea.

Chosen one of the best art books of 2013 by Brian SewellNominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.

It is particularly fitting that this book should be published to coincide with the Sir John Soane’s Museum’s aptly titled exhibition: ‘Alan Sorrell – A Life Reconstructed’. This makes it possible at last to assess the full range of Sorrell’s work and the underlying poetic vision that runs through it. Comprising a series of essays the book sets out to chart Sorrell’s life and achievements, as well as illustrating the range and diversity of his talents, most works having never previously been reproduced. … Alan Sorrell (1904-1974) attended the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s during a period which saw the emergence of talents such as Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Henry Moore and Barnett Freedman. This book demonstrates that though Sorrell’s work has been less well documented his talent was comparable to that of artists more usually associated with the RCA’s formidable reputation during the interwar years.

The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner or a dining room. Others are intended to be the highest expressions of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that like the frescoes of the Renaissance would speak through the ages to later generations. The individuals and committees who commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they occupied and inspiring moral purpose.

It is rare for a creative artist to work in the privacy of his garden shed, in a challenging medium, and almost entirely for his own pleasure, but such a one was the slate-carver, John McKenzie. His day job was working as a steward in the Petty Officers’ Mess aboard H.M.S. Condor, the Fleet Air Arm Training School at Arbroath, Angus, on the east coast of Scotland…. It has been said that sculptors can be divided into two categories - whittlers and modellers. McKenzie definitely falls into the former, as he was clearly never happier than with a knife or some other cutting or engraving tool in his hand; rejecting wood as too soft, perhaps too feminine, he sought for something more challenging and settled on Welsh slate, a hard and obdurate material. The small body of work he produced, probably not more than a hundred and fifty pieces in total, form a unique record of the dreams as well as the everyday genteel world of this working-class Phidias from Glasgow who, after his father’s death, moved to Arbroath with his mother, living with her for the remainder of her life.

Victor Hume Moody created timeless images of an Arcadian idyll at a time when most artists had turned their backs on the classical tradition. The centuries old heritage of Western art was too inspiring and too valuable for him to simply abandon. Over a working life of nearly 70 years he tirelessly researched and worked to revive traditional painting techniques. At the same time he created a unique fusion of classical figure composition and the pastoral English landscape…. Very little survives of Victor Moody’s thoughts on art and he published nothing to explain the evolution of his distinctive and idiosyncratic style of painting. His daughter Catherine Moody, who took over from him as Head of Malvern School of Art, felt that he had expressed “... all that he wished to convey through his brush and not with the supplement of verbal statement.”

Ziegler was born in London in 1903 and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He subsequently (from 1927 to 1930) studied at the Royal College of Art under William Rothenstein, whom he recalled as a lively and inspiring Principal.
After leaving the RCA Ziegler taught drawing and painting at St. Martin's School of Art (where he was a visiting instructor for Figure Drawing and Painting) and Art History at Morley College in London and for the Worker's Educational Associa-tion. His work was widely reproduced in publications including Illustrated London News, Country Life, Architectural Review, Master Builder, Architecture Illustrated, Studio Artist, Courier, London Mercury Leader, Bookman and The Artist. His Royal Academy exhibits (which between 1931 and 1970 numbered 12) were mostly of his locality: Chelsea in the 1930s, Hendon and Hertfordshire in the 1940s and Hampstead from the 1950s onwards. In the final year of his life, 1971, Ziegler was given an exhibition at Kenwood House, London – the first living artist to be so honoured

This is the first exhibition of Kettering-based artist Walter Bonner Gash since his death, some 83 years ago. While Gash's ceuvre is full of the period charm that might be expected from the decades that bridge either side of the Edwardian era, his pictures consistently offer something more substantial. His genre paintings bring to mind those of Charles Spencelayh but they display a less predictable and less laboured narrative. As a landscape painter he painted en plein air with relish; he excelled in the medium of pastel. According to his daughter, portraiture was the genre he enjoyed most. His portraits are consistently striking, moving impressively from conversation pieces, such as I. elegant and engaging family group of c.1919, to the tradition of Swagger portraits which recall those of Gainsborough, Lawrence and Sargent. For an artist who died before he was sixty, it is striking that his most memorable images are amongst his last. It is hoped that Walter Bonner Gash: Unsung Edwardian Hero will firmly re-establish Gash's reputation and demonstrate that his talent stands comparison with those of the better known Kettering artists.

Stanley Lewis (1905-2009) was reluctant to sell his art during his life-time. He kept all his major works. He later gave some to museums. He turned down offers from galleries, preferring to work without constraints, choosing to eam a much needed regular income through teaching (over 10 years at Newport School of Art and 22 years as Principal of Carmarthen School of Art). His work is highly distinctive and he remained faithful throughout his life to a graphic and stylised manner developed early on in his career. Perhaps the most enduring aspect of his legacy is the remarkable cycle of paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy celebrating Welsh subjects: The Welsh Dresser, The Welsh Mole Catcher and The Welsh Farmer. Stanley also strongly identified with the land: on the one hand his calling to art was a vocation; on the other his approach was disarmingly unpretentious.

Had Raymond Sheppard lived beyond his mid 40s his reputation as one of the foremost illustrators of his generation might have been secured – his premature death resulted in his name sinking into obscurity for half a century. Only his prolific career as an illustrator (nearly 100 children’s books in the single decade following the end of WW2) has prevented his name from disappearing altogether and secured him a credible place in the standard reference works of the period. What has never been appreciated before is the remarkable diversity of Raymond Sheppard’s oeuvre. Aside from his more familiar studies of wildlife his studio has revealed a series of remarkable portraits, thrilling boy’s-own period illustrations, plein air seascapes, landscapes, views of the Thames and surreal compositions, which at times verge on abstraction

The paintings produced during both Wars represented a new departure: the aim was no longer to produce eulogies to heroic military leaders and national triumph. Rather, artists sought to portray the impact of war on society as a whole, in battle and on the home front their body of work providing a unique portrait of a nation in bloody conflict and social upheaval. The artists of both Wars adapted and directed their work towards national needs, recognising the importance of recording as well as responding to the events and individuals around them, often taking huge risks to create their works. Some paid with their lives. Eric Ravilious, death in 1942 was one of the great tragedies of the War Artists schemes.
The pictures reproduced in this catalogue capture the breadth of experience of civilian and military life. the national mood at home and the contrasting and varied responses to the two World Wars. They also provide a fascinating cross-section of artistic practice during two of the most critical periods in twentieth-century British history.

This current catalogue has been two years in the making. The 150 objects chosen have been divided into three sections: Paintings, Works on Paper, and Design. The Design section is fascinating because it presents items that are rarely seen, comprising works in plaster, works on tracing paper, works on lithographic zinc plates, original wood-blocks, copper plates, stage sets, and poster designs. Neither pure paintings, pure drawings nor pure sculptures, they are seen as commercially problematic. In this catalogue they are celebrated. The immediacy and the beauty of the original wood-blocks by Frank Brangwyn, the original copper plates by Robert Sargent Austin, and the plaster maquettes by James Woodford, are, we hope, self-evident.

John Cecil Stephenson

Published: 200764 pages 41 illustrationsISBN: 978-0-905062-42

Cecil Stephenson was one of the pioneers of abstract art in England, along with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, John Piper, Edward Wadsworth and half-a-dozen others. This move towards abstraction had two principal strands, one leaning towards surrealism and the other to geo-metric abstraction, or Constructivism as it came to be known. Stephenson and his friends were mostly in the latter camp, and the London Gallery exhibition drew them together along with a distinguished group of foreign exhibitors including Moholy-Nagy, Calder, Giacometti, Helion and Naum Gabo.
Just as Mondrian began his journey towards non-figuration through the modification and simplification of forms, natural and man-made – branches of trees and elements of church architecture – so Stephenson began his through isolating and refining industrial elements – cogs, axles, wheels, pistons, etc – derived from the multiple pieces of machinery he managed to house within his Hampstead studio.

Canney was an innovator, and discovered the possibilities created by the invention of a new medium. Alkyd oil paint was developed in the 30s and 40s for industrial processes which required special paint finish. The addition of alkyd resin to oil paint gives more flexibility when dry and speeds up the drying process. This medium was to have a profound influence on Canney's work in his later years. Michael Canney's art developed throughout his life, but once he had adopted the Constructivist style he continued it. Experimenting with both composition and media, his work combines visual beauty and a love for materials, with a sharp intellectual study of form, geometry and balance. His own very particular style developed alongside some of the major names of the modern movement in British art. This comprehensive show of Canney's work provides the opportunity to enjoy, and reassess his own contribution to 20th century British abstract art.

Many of the artists featured in this catalogue — Monnington, Jas Wood, Banting, Colquhoun, Stephenson, Medley, Rowntree,Vaughan, Canney and Nockolds —moved freely between figurative and abstract art. It was part of their journey. In their ambitious exploration to find a pure art that went beyond reality, they often stopped, or hesitated, and in many cases returned to figurative painting. Artists such as Bush, Knights, Kelly and Cundall remained throughout their lives purely figurative. Their best work, however, is underpinned by an economy of design, which not only verges on the abstract, but was fed by the compositional purity developed by the pursuit of abstraction.

British Paintings & Works on Paper1880-1980

Published: 2004128 pages 89 illustrations

There is no obvious explanation for today’s neglect of artists such as Sir Frank Brangwyn, Albert de Belleroche, Clara Klinghoffer, Richard Carline, Charles Cundall and Sir Gerald Kelly.They were hugely celebrated in their day, and it is only a matter of time before the pendulum swings back. Art moves in and out of fashion: what one generation celebrates, the next forgets or rejects. The works of art do not change, nor their quality; in the life cycle of fashion it is only perceptions that alter What Monnington termed ‘works with integrity’ will always stand the test of time.

Robert Austin

Published: 200248 pages +65 illustrations

Printmaker and draughtsman, Robert Austin was born in Leicester. He studied at the School of Art there and at the Royal College of Art, 1914-16 and 1919-22, winning the Rome Scholarship for engraving in the latter year. He taught engraving at the Royal College of Art, 1927-44, becoming Professor in the Department of Graphic Design, 1948-55. He showed with RWS, of which he was a member and President; RE, of which he was a member; and the RA, to which he was elected in 1949. Austin was a meticulous craftsman-engraver and a vigorous draughtsman, as his series of drawings of Women's Auxiliary Air Force and ballooning activities done during World War II shows. The Tate Gallery holds his work.

The Laporte Collection has attempted to accommodate the broadest range of tastes by drawing on the remarkable diversity of British art during the past 120 years. The aim of the hanging scheme has been to create a picture-rich environment which is visually uplifting, combining works which are instantly legible with works which are visually more challenging. Where possible, works have been placed to accentuate different areas of activity within the office – for instance, the board room is now dominated by Monnington’s celebration of science, a design originally conceived for the Conference Hall of Bristol Council House...

Charles Mahoney

Published: 199972 pages 75 illustrations

Mahoney's aims as artist and teacher were of a similar nature to those of the early artist-craftsmen such as Giotto. Teaching, for him, was not just a means of earning a living; it was a calling to which he devoted a major part of his life and an enormous amount of physical and nervous energy. With his appreciation of history he may have been able to afford to take a long view of the development of style, but he was passionate that students should learn their craft from the bottom up. Provided the skills were passed on the future was assured. Just as good gardeners propagate and plant for the future. Mahoney, through passion and zeal, nurtured and encouraged those students who were sympathetic to his approach to history and art.

Lawrence Gowing describes Monnington as a compositional master in the tradition of the great Tuscan and Umbrian fresco painters and quotes lohn Lessore, former pupil, as saying: 'If anyone ever understood composition, he did, and so drawing, the volume and movement of which he explained geometrically, not in terms of measurement and surface realism: the appearance was always subordinate to the underlying structure ... Every pencil mark tells us a bit more about this unique character, the extraordinary originality of his mind, every period of his life – the Slade. Italy, the early portraits and murals (House of Commons. Bank of England). the ceilings. the Stations of the Cross, the abstracts, every period makes its own contribution. Only in this way can we grasp the size of his mind and how it evolved and absorbed such an astonishing range of experience, art and life, all perfectly connected and related.’

Winifred Knights exhibited her work with reluctance, and a retrospective exhibition of her major paintings would total seven in number. She worked inordinately slowly, with consummate care: nothing in her work was left to chance, everything was prepared and thought out. Her reluctance to exhibit was not related to strong self-criticism, indeed the opposite would be true: her son John remembers her total confidence in her work.
She attended the Slade School of Art, London, from October 1915 to July 197, when she won the Second Prize for Figure Drawing. During this period she began to be recognised as an outstanding draughtswoman. In 1920 became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome.